This 1966 Video of Market Street Neon Signs is Spellbinding

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As Market Street makes news for preparing to go car free next week, it’s pretty amazing to take a peek at this video of what it looked like in the 1960s.

Market Street used to be one of San Francisco’s bustling commercial hubs. Just look how beautiful and luminous it was in this video:

A few landmarks like The Warfield, and The Orpheum are still around but most of these businesses are long gone and have unfortunately taken their lovely neon signs with them.

I found this video on the YouTube page for San Francisco Neon, but I’m not sure where they got it. What’s extra rad is that someone in the comments figured out almost exactly when this footage was taken. As user antaresrichard mentions:

This footage of Market Street was taken no earlier than Thursday, December 22, 1966 and no later than the following Thursday. Checking the marquees of the Telenews and Paris theaters, with their one week engagements, against the San Francisco Chronicle’s archival movie listings produced the aforementioned time window.

There is further conjecture in the comments that given the quality of the footage, it was most likely recorded to be used in a movie or TV show shot in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, once they started digging under Market Street while constructing BART in the late 60s, it made the area an absolute mess and had a dire impact on many of the local businesses. In fact, most of Market from Van Ness to 5th Street still hasn’t recovered.